The Gardenia Gives Off Fragrance in the Early Summer Rain...
Synopsis Part 1 Gai, a private detective, and his partner Kiko, a young girl, are hired by the widow of a cosmetics company executive to search for her lost black cat. They cross paths with Hei, who is on the search of the Contractor killing employees from the very same company. As the two groups continue to peruse in their search, Gai unexpectedly comes across the skeleton of a long dead woman. In the meantime, Hei discovers that the Contractor killing off the employees has the ability to switch bodies. Part 2 Gai continues his investigation, even suspecting his own client of murder, while Hei continues to go after the body-switching Contractor. Mao, who temporarily switches bodies with a crow, nearly drowns in the process. Eventually, however, Gai's client confesses that she found the body of her husband's ex-wife a while back, but decided against calling the police. She reveals that she hired Gai so he could check up on the ex-wife, and finally report her death. Hei finally manages to trap the contractor, and kills him so fast, that the contractor was unable to use his ability. The Contractor, although, like Mao, had fullfilled his contract, dies sniffing his socks (his obeisance), as a last reminder of who he was. Details One stormy night, a Contractor attacks a man on a rooftop and uses his powers to take over the man’s body. Using this body, he takes out a vial of liquid and places it on his former body before walking over and balancing himself on the railing. He then returns himself to his own body with his power, allowing the man to plummet to his death. In the aftermath, he pulls a cloth out of his pocket and sniffs it. Sometime later, at the Kurasawa Detective Agency, Kurasawa Gai is enjoying a cigarette in a dark room when his partner Kiko comes in, smells the smoke, and opens all the windows. She then tells Gai to get serious because there are bills that need to be paid - specifically the television one because she has an anime she wants to watch. Their argument gets interrupted by the arrival of a beautiful widow who wants them to search for a cat. Gai isn’t so keen on the idea, but the woman offers to pay 500,000 yen, half of it in advance. Loving the sound of that, Kiko takes the case. At lunch later, Gai is shocked to see a guy - Li - sitting at another table eating bowl after bowl of ramen. Kiko is thinking about the case of the missing cat, but Gai’s attention turns to a newspaper article about a former employee of a cosmetics company falling to his death. He finds it strange because there’s been a string of apparent suicides from the same Fiore company. This reminds Kiko that she smelled Fiore perfume on the widow earlier. Li soon finishes eating at his own table and heads outside where the daughter of the owner of the restaurant is feeding Mao, who she has named Hernandez. Kiko meanwhile starts her search for the missing cat by having the neighborhood children bring black cats to her. Since he’s scared of cats, Gai has instead dug up some interesting information: the widow’s dead husband was an executive at Fiore. Seeing a connection, Gai decides to pay a visit to the widow and is let in by a suspicious looking housekeeper. While he waits, Gai notices a picture of the widow and an elderly man who appears to be her grandfather. He also sees a shelf full of perfume bottles, and the widow interrupts him as he’s inspecting them. Gai is unable to keep his eyes off her large chest, so he tries to turn the subject to the perfume collection. The widow reveals that it was her husband’s hobby and that he was sensitive to smells. Her cat Chanel then gets on Gai’s lap, freaking him out. After going to the bathroom, Gai makes his way back to talk to the widow, but accidentally enters the wrong room and finds Li arranging books in a personal library. Gai learns from the widow upon his return that Li is doing that as a part time job. With no news about her cat, Gai starts to say that he has a few things to ask her, causing her to jump to the conclusion that he wants to talk about Toshiko. She thinks that he already knows about how she’s her husband second wife after having stolen him away from his original wife Toshiko. However, the widow feels that Toshiko got a good deal because she got compensated very well monetarily and got the mansion. What’s more, she thinks that Toshiko took the cat and wants Gai to investigate that mansion. She gets really close to Gai and starts to beg him - so close that she sees his earwax and offers to clean his ears for him. It is while she is doing this that she reveals that she wears a strong perfume that smells of gardenias. After he leaves her home, Gai runs into Li again at the bus stop, and this time he properly introduces himself. The combination of Li working there, the beautiful widow, and the suspicious housekeeper makes Gai think that something is definitely up. Back at the office, Kiko tells him that she’s taking time off because off because of an important event going on in Aoto. Unbeknownst to either of them, that night, Hei and Mao track down the Contractor who’s been killing the cosmetic company employees. As the Contractor takes deep breaths of a cloth, Mao appears and questions if that is his contract’s price. Hei soon appears behind Mao and throws his dagger to trip the now-fleeing Contractor. However, when he gets grabbed by Hei, the Contractor activates his powers. Luckily for Hei, Mao knocks him out of the way, but this allows the Contractor to escape. Mao explains afterwards that Hei should thank him because Hei was about to be taken over. It seems that the Contractor has the same power as Mao: the ability to possess others. Mao is limited to other animals, but that Contractor can go from between person to person. The following day, Gai tries to call Toshiko on the phone but gets no answer. When the cafe waitress comes to ask him for his order, Gai gets up and leaves, though he forgets his jacket initially. He goes back to get it, but accidentally takes the similar looking jacket of the person who was sitting behind him: the Contractor. Neither of them notices the mistake yet, and so Gai walks off with the wrong jacket. Gai then sees Li on the sidewalk and follows him into an alley. Li hides himself and, as Gai passes, Li contacts Mao to tell the cat to keep an eye on the Contractor at the cafe. However, the cat just meows and goes the other way. Gai meanwhile starts to think that Li might have something to do with Toshiko, but he continues on to Toshiko’s house anyway. It is there that he encounters her neighbor who calls the house a garbage mansion. Back at the cafe, the Contractor finally realizes that Gai got the wrong jacket. By now, Gai has climbed over the fence into Toshiko’s yard and finds garbage bags strewn all over. Inside the mansion is even more garbage, but in one of the rooms, Gai discovers a black cat. He attempts to catch it, and although he initially fails, he eventually grabs it with his jacket when the cat stops in front of a set of doors. Having succeeded in catching the cat, Gai suddenly notices that the room in front of him contains the skeleton of a woman. Hei manages to track down a Fiore company directory from ten years ago and hands it over to Huang, but the group’s problem right now is that they don’t know where Mao is. At that moment, a police sergeant named Yabuta Tatsuo is bringing Mao to the Yuzuki household, though Mao is at a complete loss for where he is right now. Yabuta later explains to Gai that the corpse he found in the house filled with garbage was identified as Katsuragi Toshiko, and the police suspect she died after the upstairs railing she was leaning against broke and she fell to her death. He refers to Gai as Matsukichi, but even though Gai says that he threw that name away and is now called Kurasawa Gai, Yabuta isn’t impressed and thinks that detective work is impossible for Gai. On the way back to the Yuzuki house, Gai runs into Hei on the street and questions what Hei is doing loitering around. Hei claims that he’s out for a walk because the stars are pretty, but when Gai looks up to see what Hei is talking about, Hei uses the opportunity to disappear. When he arrives at the Yuzuki house, Gai learns that the cat he caught and gave the police to return to Arisa was the wrong one. Unbeknownst to them, the cat they have is Mao who’s worried about losing his wireless bell communicator and being turned over to the public health department. Talking with Gai, Arisa recalls being visited by Toshiko when Toshiko was still married and remembers realizing that Toshiko didn’t wear perfume. Her late husband had never told Toshiko to wear perfume because he didn’t hate her body odor, and this was very frustrating for Arisa. As Gai leaves the house afterwards, the housekeeper gives him Mao in a cage to take along. Unsure of what to do with a cat, Gai plays around with the idea of throwing Mao into the river until Mao speaks up against animal abuse. Gai doesn’t notice that it was the cat who spoke, so he looks around and sees the Contractor who’s been following him because of the jacket. Gai recognizes the Contractor from the cafe and thinks that this man has something to do with the case, but he jumps to the wrong conclusions when the Contractor asks if Gai is also a Contractor. Tired of the talk that’s not bringing him any closer to getting his jacket back, the Contractor activates his power and takes over Gai’s body. In stumbling backwards from the initial body transfer, the Contractor inadvertently knocks Mao’s cage down the steps towards the river, but the Contractor doesn’t notice because he’s only concerned about the jacket. Mao looks around and finds a crow in a nearby tree, so he decides to uses his own power to possess it. He is able to use the crow’s body to steal the jacket and fly away with it, but unfortunately he doesn’t pay attention to where he’s headed and smacks right into the side of a bridge. Luckily for Mao, he’s still able to see his cage and returns to the cat body before the crow hits the ground and dies. Having figured out that Mao is the same cat from last time, the Contractor gets ready to kick the cage into the river, but he then gets attacked by Hei. Speaking quickly, Mao advises Hei to get into the guy’s blind spot so that Hei won’t be possessed. Hei manages to pull the Contractor against the railing and jump behind him, but the Contractor is now within sight of his old body, so he throws the jacket over and returns to it. Back in his original body, the Contractor immediately stands up, grabs the jacket, and runs off. Hei attempts to chase him, but this lets loose the cable that was holding Gai’s body to the railing, so Gai’s body tumbles backwards towards Mao’s cage and the river. Mao’s cries for help force Hei to give up the chase in order to save the cat and Gai instead. The next day, Gai has a cold even though he’s not sure what happened. When Kiko tells him about hearing of something strange in the neighborhood concerning Arisa, Gai inquires around and finds himself back at Toshiko’s house where the garbage men are collecting all the trash. It is here that Gai notices some plastic bottles glinting in the sunlight and realizes something. Elsewhere, Hei gets a picture of the Contractor from Yin and shows it to Mao, but the cat initially doesn’t respond because he’s connected to the network. Since Hei doesn’t know what that means, Mao explains that a server compensates for the shortfalls of a cat’s brain. Sometimes this doesn’t work, so the cat’s consciousness wins over - that’s what happened earlier when Mao was at the garbage mansion. As for the person they’re after, Yin identifies him as Ukiyama Norio, a Contractor with the ability to manipulate gravity. Hei finds this weird because Ukiyama has shown his power to be possessing other people, so Yin tells him that the person with the power to possess is Amitabh Kapur who is in north India. Mao realizes that Kapur took over Norio’s body, and during that time lost his own body in some accident. Gai meanwhile returns to Arisa to reveal that the police found out that Toshiko had chronic heart disease and think that she had a heart attack, causing her to fall over that railing. Although the police have ruled it an accident, Arisa detects some doubt in Gai and wonders if he suspects her. Gai starts by questioning why Arisa sent him to Toshiko’s house, and when Arisa tries to say it was because of the missing cat, Gai asserts that Toshiko wouldn’t have taken the cat because she didn’t like them, as was evident by the plastic bottles filled with water. Instead, he thinks that Arisa wanted him to find Toshiko’s remains and explains that he was told that Arisa was seen around that area half a year ago. Thinking that she had enough motive, Gai accuses her of being the criminal, but when she asks him for evidence, he can only say that it’s a detective’s intuition. Arisa starts laughing at his request to turn herself in to the police and reveals that Toshiko was already dead when she got there. She had heard about the garbage and had gone to check it out because that’s where her husband had lived since he was young, so Arisa didn’t want it to get dirty. That’s when she found the dead body. Arisa hadn’t told anyone about it because she wanted to stay out of trouble, though in truth she had thought at the time that it would have been fine for Toshiko’s body odor to become rotten. Gai doesn’t understand this because Arisa had been the one who stole Toshiko’s husband and ended up getting everything, so Arisa explains that her husband had greedily used all his senses including seeing, touching, and licking. If it had just been those, Arisa wouldn’t have lost to Toshiko, but her husband was mainly obsessed with smell, and the smell he loved wasn’t Arisa’s. She knows now how strange it seems now for her to have been fixated on body odor, but Arisa feels she only achieved the title of wife, so she hadn’t been able to get what she had really wanted. While she and Gai are having this conversation, Hei meets with the Contractor and quickly kills him. The last thing the Contractor does before dying is to sniff a dirty sock. Hei finds some vials on the Contractor which Mao explains are from industrial spies. After Huang appears and makes Hei hand over the vials, Mao wonders if the price of this contract was really smelling socks since Hei hadn’t allowed the Contractor any time to use his power before dying. Huang suggests that the Contractor just wanted to smell, making Mao realize that this sock must have belonged to the original Amitabh Kapur. The smell on it is the only thing that remains of Kapur’s body, and Mao thinks that maybe this guy’s price had been paid when he lost his body - just like Mao. It is sometime later that the daughter of the ramen shop owner who fed Mao finds a similar looking cat. She at first thinks it’s Hernandez - her name for Mao - but she soon notices that its a different cat. When the cat runs away from her, its collar falls off and the girl finds that the cat’s name is Miiko - the same cat that Gai had been searching for. Gai, however, never ended up finding that cat and thinks that perhaps it was all an excuse. Regardless, he doesn’t care too much because he got the rest of the payment, so this is all in the past. He also notes that he sees Hei around sometimes, but he only thinks of Hei as someone who eats a lot. At that moment, Hei comes out of the ramen shop and finds Mao sleeping across the street on a playground slide. Mao doesn’t like being woken up since he finally got to have a dream, which surprises Hei because he didn’t know Mao could see dreams. Mao admits that it was only a silly little dream where he ate and bathed, though it makes him think of how great it is to become a cat. Seeing Hei’s gloomy face, Mao winks and tells Hei that this is the point that Hei should laugh. Characters in Order of Appearance Episode 7 Episode 8 Gallery Story 4 title.png Story 4 quote.png S1E7 Widow and Kiko Kayanuma.png S1E7 Rika feeds Mao.png S1E7 Amitabh Kapoor profile.png S1E7 Amitabh Kapoor murders employee.png S1E7 Widow profile.png ScreenHunter 06 Jan 25 00 02.gif S1E8 Toshiko Tatsuragi.png S1E8 Tatsuo Yabuta.PNG S1E7 Widow and Gai Kurusawa.png S1E7 Kiko Kayanuma uses kids.png S1E7 Gai Kurusawa tries to catch Mao.png S1E8 Tatsuo Yabuta and Gai Kurusawa.png S1E8 Gai Kurusawa confronts Widow.png S1E8 Mao steals Amitabh Kapoor jacket from Gai Kurusawa.png S1E8 Amitabh Kapoor smells sock.png Navigation